I remember my first attempt at overclocking was an Intel Pentium 233 MMX. Smoked it playing Quake with my Riva 128 (still not sure of the root cause, would boot, but very slow). Made a nice key-chain/conversation piece, but turned me off of overclocking for a good while. Upside was my replacement was a K6.

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Oh man that was back when you had to OC by switching pins in the mobo....

Rebuilding my x58 system with a watercooling loop I forgot to reattach the power to the pump. I went down stairs thinking ill let it run for a while to let all the bubbles out. It didnt take long when I heard some whining noise and ran back up and pulled the power plug from the wall. So after removing the molten waterblock I checked the mobo and the prosessor and it has to have been my lucky day since both of them survived

Not my first fail but something similar to the above. Swapped mothjerboards on my 2nd PC, forgot to connect the fan from the radiator to the board. The only thing I had in the loop was a GTX295 which was folding on both cores 100%, temps. Thank god the loop cooled pretty well passively and temps only got up to 102º, but it sure was a scary moment. I was starting to sweat inside my room when I'm usually freezing.

- Stay clear of spinning blades- fans hurt
- Motherboard standoffs are not optional if they are supposed to be used in your case
- The strength of a CPU socket may not be equal to the clamping force of cooler hardware
- Fires are possible- keep a fire extinquisher nearby
- Water cooling loops only work with flowing water in them
- Rings (wedding, etc...) are best taken off before working in your rig
- Turn PC off when removing/installing parts
- Keep hammers as far away from your PC as possible
- A CPU IHS is not designed for removal
- Don't let ants eat your hard drive*
* Sorry had to add that one (see post #60 & #78)

I think that should sum up everyone's experiences here so far- if you have any other stories or tips of FAIL to post... feel free to add them on.

I had a loop in my pc, with a water block on the graphics card and CPU, stupidly i did not put no clips on the blocks. Well I was using my PC and the screen went all funny, like a major artifact, so i looked in my PC window but could not see anything wrong, so I just rebooted. It came back on and got to windows, and just did the same thing, so I thought mmm and got my torch and looked into the case. There was water covering the graphics card and running off the edges into the case. Oh shit, I pulled the power lead. The CPU block was leaking from a barb. I let it all dry and it was OK luckily. I used clips on all the connections after that.

I was using a prebuilt AMD XP1600 system for the longest time. The CPU was definently showing it's age. I had a few online friends that wanted me to upgrade so I could play BF2 with them, but I was broke and unemployed at the time. A few of them gave me the various parts I needed to build a faster computer, P4 Northwood 2.6ghz cpu, ASUS socket 478 mobo(don't remember the exact model), 4 gigs of RAM, Old Cooler Master case and a PSU. Turns out that some of the RAM that was sent to me wasn't the right type of RAM.. Once I assembled everything and powered up the system for the first time, something on the board immediately fried shooting a stream of smoke out of my case. I believe some of the RAM sent to me was SD as two of the sticks looked different than the other two and the MOBO needed DDR, but considering this was my first custom build, I didn't know any better.. Never could get that system to boot on that board. I ended up trading my XP1600 system to my mom for a new MOBO for the P4 set-up. That P4 with the MOBO I got trading is still working to this day(eventually gave it to a friend that is still using it)

Now be honest here. How many of you have crushed the core on a Axp? For me, I never did out of the hundreds of times I have installed coolers on Athlon Xp's. Never used or owned a shim either. Now I just got one in the last load of parts I got. I threw it in a box of spare parts.

My first build ever, had system running for about 1 month, lightning struck down in house and I was so smart... didn't connect it to a grounded wall socket.
The system never ever started again, CPU, GPU, MoBo..everything gone in a 'flash'.

Thats what i was thinking. I did a little google research and apparently certain ants are attracted to electronic devices or it may be due to the magnetic field of certain devices... anyway it sounds like they eat some of the rubber and plastic parts.

Thats what i was thinking. I did a little google research and apparently certain ants are attracted to electronic devices or it may be due to the magnetic field of certain devices... anyway it sounds like they eat some of the rubber and plastic parts.

Now im scared of ants in my house

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I believe all insects are attracted to the flux waves electronics produce.

My First fail would have to be removing a P4 Northwood B with a Coolermaster heatsink, bent pins on CPU.

my first fail... not putting a sticky note on the comp that i was repairing in school saying "do not turn on this computer" as i hadn't finished assembling the cooler. although the rest of the system was ready to go. At was an AMD-K6 system running at 500mhz... beleive it or not these were the computers my school was STILL using in the Technology class... in my sophmore year.. about 2004-05. well anyway another student decided he also knows stuff about computers, and turn it on to finish installing windows... his class period was right after mine. mine was 1st, his 2nd period, each being 90min. well i met him at lunch during 3rd period. he said he saw the computer i was working on and that i was doing a good job with it but it ran slow as hell... i took it as a compliment tho seeing as he was 2 grades above me and i figured he already put the cooler on and was just being picky that it was an old 500mhz rig. well aparantly the comp had been used during 3rd and 4th periods by other students trying to run emulators.... well the next day when i come in, the teacher said students were complianing about slow performance... i figured ok... its probably the video still using the basic video driver.... well i was right... but... it was also b/c there was no heatsink or fan on the cpu! it had been running 20+ hrs with only the cpu's integrated heat spreader! now if that isn't a burn test i dunno what is! well surprisingly the computer was still running fine, although VERY slowly. I shut it down, let the cpu cool, put the fan and cooler on and booted it back up. ran fine and MUCH faster in windows (was win98se). I installed the video driver, and played some SNES emulators haha. now the sad part... THIS WAS NOW THE FASTEST COMP IN THE LAB! it even performed faster than the 1.8ghz celeron rigs with xp (they only had 256mb ram and "intel extreme grapics 2").

Moral of the story... put idiot labels on stuff when idiots are nearby. the rest is a TLDR part of how that FAIL turned into an EPIC WIN for my high school career.

however, it did turn into a win... instead of having to do all the other BS class work, all i had to do was fix the comps up lol. The teacher had a parts bin somewhere and I managed to get all the comps working (2/3 of the comps wouldn't even post on day one of class). I also had my first run-in with a slocket adaptor... that was interesting to say the least... i saw the jumpers on the card and managed to overclock the cpu from 500 to 733, installed a radeon 7500, and loaded up Aces High. of course i did have to do one project,... the final exam project. it was easy tho... build something. yes... that was the assignment... "research and build something"... obviously school appropriate. well i decided to build a scale Ferris wheel that was motorized... apparently i did soo well with it that to this day (to the best of my knowledge) the tech teachers still have it in their office as an example. i also still hold the record for longest strand of paper cut from a standard sheet of printing paper.

that was fun. I also found a way into the school network, and copied the "spawned" version of starcraft to the network... i could then play starcraft no matter what class i was in (well so long as there was a computer lol). I also set up a proxy at home to bypass their friggin firewall so i could use (sadly to say) myspace and gametrailers.com along with arcadetown.com and miniclip.com

well i apparently got attention from the rest of the teachers that did the tech related classes. i pretty much got a free A in those classes as long as i did the final exams and fixed all the computer issues that came up. things from helping students figure out how to network windows ME machines (yes... windows ME!... i went as far as to make a custom boot screen calling it windws Special ed. with a picture of a short bus lol) it stayed as the boot screen until they had to re-install windows lol. well after doing so much work with the tech classes the local IT department for the school system decided to "hire" me in a youth apprenticeship class. it was more or less a free A. i was paid $6.15 an hr.... minimum wage. which i guess was fair since i got a free A for a grade as well... an also pretty much got to do what the hell i wanted my jr and snr years in school lol. it was enough that i got about $165 a month to spend on my computer for my jr and snr years lol. i had the right to brag about my rig in school since i actually earned the monies and wasn't just givin a free comp by rich mommy and daddy and ironically mine was better than most of those anyway well my performance doing work for the school also led up to my first job. I ended up landing a job as an assistant system administrator for Akins Ford Corp in the town i live in. had that job up until Q4 of 2009. been unemployed since pretty much with an occasional odd job here or there and working security night shift for the Petite LeMans at Road Atlanta. I plan to do the other race events as well... can wait for the Drift competitions!

believe it or not... that's the condensed version! all of that and i managed to help run a gaming clan. lets be honest here.... most gamers on this site was big into the clan thing back in the days of starcraft, warcraft III, and CS1.6... and we all felt like accomplishing something when we climbed the ranks. i managed to get up to 4star general and help organize events while keeping up with homework and school related tech problems. Does anyone here that played on USEast servers for starcraft and the like remember Wolves in Exile? hah found my old xfire profile http://fr.xfire.com/profile/xbrucewx/ i usually closed xfire when playing CS and SCBW so the hrs aren't all there lol.

Well, this certainly won't be my first fail (I can't even remember what it was) but never one to be slow to take the chance of humiliating myself in public, here's one I just made right on this very forum:

My first build ever, had system running for about 1 month, lightning struck down in house and I was so smart... didn't connect it to a grounded wall socket.
The system never ever started again, CPU, GPU, MoBo..everything gone in a 'flash'.

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You have ungrounded wall sockets?
That seems like medieval times to me!

Here in Germany we can pull about 2200w per socket, everything is grounded, and triple protected, and power outages are so rare, they happen maybe once, or twice a year...

i cant understand how the US can have such a third country power distribution net!

the usa is screwed up in that regard... a house can have ungrounded 10A lines, or it can have over engineered 40A grounded lines with GFI plugs lol. edit: a good 40A line will let you safely pull 3680w at 115v. (it can do more... but my electrician friend said its not good to load more than 80% of the actual capacity)

actually, i think your lucky to find 30A lines, good for 3450w, or a safe 80% of that being about 2800w. my trailer has a bunch of 15A and 20A lines sadly... with the main breaker able to handle 200A. the most power we could possibly use at a time is 18.4kW!

Oh I remember back in the day some sire was doing some test on exploding cd's. It was cool watching them. They said something like if you put labels on cd's off center and stuff the will go up in a blast of shrapnel.